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Comment by PhilWright | Hacker News Reader

The Mill design is fascinating because it is genuinely very different to anything else. But it seems that the entire team might die from old age before they actually have any working silicon produced. Which would be a shame.

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Innovative CPU architectures and popular fantasy novel series both..

While I get the sense that this is Ivan's "baby" I'm pretty sure that he hasn't held anything back from the rest of the team and that they could carry on without him. Although his mind is as sharp as ever and his hair is fabulous so I'm not really worried about his health either.

Also, a popular computing textbook series.

Yeah, I'd love to see some more money or resources poured into this.

So would we. See millcomputing.com -> About -> Invest in Us.

They aren't trying to produce silicon, they are trying to produce patents.

No, they are trying to produce silicon. This is their explicit goal. They're just recently caught up in filing a lot of patents because of changes to patent law.

The goal of their first funding round was to create a patent portfolio; the second is earmarked for an FPGA implementation. Hard to do it the other way around, although to be honest FPGA dev kits are so cheap these days I don't know why this requires a funding round.

My understanding is that the cost of the FPGA implementation is about the cost of modifying the tooling that produces a Mill family member from a spec to produce Verilog as described in the 'Specification' talk https://millcomputing.com/docs/specification/

Depends on the size of the chip you are trying to model, once your chip exceeds a certain level of complexity FPGA modeling can get expensive really quickly.

http://chipdesignmag.com/images/idesign/fpga/figure1.jpg

And such don't come cheap.

I suppose at $10K each, buying enough Altera Stratix 10 boards for the team could start to add up.

I don't understand this either, they could cut some corners and implement most promising ideas early. I think they delved too deep and it became too complex and alien. I would be surprised if there will be an actual mill cpu as described in the talks. Maybe eventually something that incorporates some of the ideas will be built, but not the whole enchilada.

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